Apple: The Line Begins In Palo Alto (Updated)

By Eric Savitz

And the lines begin.

With about 21 hours to go before the West Coast debut of the iPhone 3G, I took a drive over to the Apple (AAPL) store on University Avenue in Palo Alto, just a mile or two from CEO Steve Jobs’ house, to check out the scene. So far, things are pretty tame: there were about a half-dozen people in line.

At the front of the line, sitting in a folding chair on the corner of University and Kipling, just around the corner from the front door, was 17-year-old Danny Fukuba, a recent graduate of Palo Alto High School. Fukuba and two of his friends, 16-year-old Eric Vicenti, who will be a senior at Paly in the fall, and 19-year-old Noah Rogers, a Paly grad who now goes to Foothill College, say they took their spots in line at 9 p.m. last night. They came armed with sleeping backs, folding chairs, a mattress, an Xbox, a monitor, and Guitar Hero guitars. They were actually playing Guitar Hero in the street in the middle of the night, until the Apple store stopped letting them plug into their electrical outlets.

Some Apple fans might actually recognize the trio; they and one other friend gained some notoriety a few weeks ago for getting caught hacking an iPhone in the very same store, after which they were waylaid by a store manager for a couple of hours and interrogated by police. (What they basically did was download a racing game onto the phone.) They were originally told by the store manager that they would be banned from the store, but Apple later denied that was true.

Next to arrive, at 5:50 a.m. this morning, was 61-year-old Taylor Barcroft, of Santa Cruz. Barcroft was sporting a Barack Obama t-shirt and matching hat, along with a 32 GB iPod Touch and a Verizon LG flip phone, now out of contract. Barcroft, who says he’s retired, has been spending his time following Obama around with a video camera, and posting the results at obama-podcast.com.

One other note: I also drove by the AT&T store at the corner of El Camino and Page Mill Road, just down the street from my office; there was no line at all.

Disclosure: My older son also goes to Palo Alto High, where as it turns out, he was on the school robotics team with both Fukuba and Vicenti. It’s a small world, after all.

Request: If you happen to be near an Apple or AT&T store anytime today or tomorrow, and can provide a report from the scene, please feel free to post it below…thanks.Update: My colleague Tiernan Ray has been bopping around Manhattan late this afternoon checking out Apple and AT&T stores, and isn’t finding a lot of activity. He found no lines at all at the Wall Street AT&T store, the Park Row store or the AT&T kiosk in the World Financial Center. Two people were waiting outside the Apple store in SoHo; no one at all outside the 14th Street store. There were about 20 people in line at the Cube on Fifth Avenue and 59th Street outside F.A.O. Schwarz; that includes some people who were handing out actual apples for free. (Organic apples, no less.) Tiernan says the people at the very front of the line have been there since July 4.

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